Scorpio Season (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781639808038)

In lush language and startling metaphor, Kalina Smith tells family truths, women's truths, and lovers' truths. At turns tender and fierce, the poems in Scorpio Season will linger with the reader long after the book is closed.

-Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, 2017-18 Oklahoma Poet Laureate, author, What I Learned at the War

Kalina Smith's debut poetry chapbook, Scorpio Season, is immersed in nature with all the senses and with every sensation: the music of water and birds and country songs, flower colors, weather in cold and hot seasons, in a culture of Christians, whiskey, kindness, and meanness. The zodiac, the calendar, and the hours measure life and death as the future unfolds, crashing, crumpling, wading, until the scorpion becomes dozens of butterflies, like the best poetry.

-Mary Meriam, author, Pools of June

"I refused to be a Capricorn, / knowing I belonged under / the Scorpio sign," Kalina Smith writes in the titular poem of her bold new chapbook, Scorpio Season. And indeed, Smith exhibits a confident knowledge of herself in these poems, as a writer, a truth-teller, someone unafraid to grapple with the complexities of the past. The poems are full of the sights and sounds of the American South, both the timeless - honeysuckle blooms, mulberry bushes, coyotes - and the timely - Kacey Musgraves, Coca Cola, UFC fights. Just as Smith blends old and new elements of the landscape, so too does she showcase a complex mixture of nostalgia for the place she's from and a desire to separate herself from it, comparing herself in one poem to "a hound dog / in a tiny gated yard." It's this tension, between heartfelt connection and defiant confrontation, that pulses at the heart of the collection. In both established forms (ex: sonnet, aubade, heroic couplet) and free verse, Smith gifts readers with a thoughtful, honest debut book that is at once heartbreaking and hopeful, searing and, at times, funny.

-Mary Sharpe, Associate Professor of English at Arkansas Tech University